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Joshua Bocanegra
Following Jesus doesn’t require rejecting my family’s culture. God loves my latinidad.
My abuela is the saintliest person I know. I spent a large portion of my early childhood in her care, and if I remember anything from that time, it’s her prayers.
She prayed while she cooked. She prayed while she cleaned or folded laundry. She prayed over my sister and me as she put us to bed, telling us Bible stories as if the characters were people we knew. She’d taught herself to read by studying Scripture, and she took Jesus at his word when he said a person should go to their closet to pray (Matt. 6:6). She kept a small stool in there to kneel in intercession for her family or for whatever other burdens she carried to the Lord.
There’s a family legend about a time my grandpa sabotaged the car to keep her from going to church with the kids. My grandma prayed, got in the car, started it, and went anyway. She was—and is—a woman of faith.
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From my earliest years, she taught me about Jesus and demonstrated what it meant to follow him even when it was hard. Our family isn’t perfect, of course, but my grandma remains my model of godliness.
My grandmother is Mexican American, with skin the color of the earth. In my late teens, I hated being Mexican. Because of the slow drip of racial microaggressions, I’d become convinced it meant being a cholo (think: gangster), doing drugs, stealing—a criminal. But in 2008, as a young adult, I moved to Kansas City and joined a multicultural church where I met many Christ-loving, Holy Spirit-filled latinoamericano friends.
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I’d had a crisis of faith, followed by a return to faith through a powerful encounter with God, and these new friends reminded me of the faith I knew from my grandmother. They showed me I could love and follow Jesus, unashamed of my ancestry. The very best of Mexican culture, that which was already in step with the Spirit, could come through even as following Jesus pruned whatever was contrary to his life and teachings.
But that wasn’t the end of my questions about the intersection of my faith and culture. I was newly devouring Scripture and discovering that its stories and teachings scrambled much of the politics and cultural assumptions I’d picked up in predominantly white Christian environments. But as I re-embraced latinidad, the cultural way of being I abandoned in my teen years, I started noticing the way many Christians around me spoke about Latin Americans. Some unbiblically insisted we’re more prone to sexual sin than white people, while others glossed over the atrocities of Spanish colonialism in Central and South America to observe that at least my ancestors got the gospel out of it.
By the time protests about race and policing in America broke out in the summer of 2020, I was tired. Being a theologically conservative Christian in the Midwest means I’m mostly surrounded by politically conservative people, and my own politics are further left. We shared one faith, but because of the cultural moment, it seemed like whatever I said about politics was easily dismissed as “critical race theory” or “wokeism.” I started thinking about moving to California.
I began watching social media videos and academic lectures about decolonization. At first, it was exciting. Here, finally, I was finding people who were grappling unapologetically with the realities of colonialism and white supremacy in ways that resonated with me intellectually and emotionally. I was intrigued by the idea of disentangling my faith and culture from broad assumptions of Western or European cultural superiority, learning about history without glossing over colonial atrocity in the New World, and healing from internalized racism.
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But as I watched, I heard more and more people say something like, Christianity was forced on us by the colonizer, and you can’t decolonize and stay a Christian. The more I heard it, the more troubled I became.
I was ready to throw out the colonial bathwater—and the tub and the soap too. Yet I could not abandon Jesus. I’d already had my crisis of faith. I’d already deconstructed and reconstructed. I’d already decided to follow Jesus after God came to me unexpectedly. But along with returning to my grandmother’s faith, I’d returned to her culture. I’d rejected the assumption I found among many white Christians, even if subconsciously held, that European colonial culture and its derivatives were superior to latinidad.
I was in turmoil. One particularly tumultuous Sunday morning, I sat with my eyes closed and my head against the pew in front of me at my Anglican church (the irony doesn’t escape me). I told God, “I don’t know how to do this.” And God answered with what may be the closest thing I’ve ever had to a vision.
I saw myself on a beach, and Jesus walking toward me. As he drew closer, I noticed his skin was brown like my grandmother’s. Holding out his hand, he said, “Come, follow me.” I took his hand, and we hugged, tight like the hugs my uncles give me. In that moment, I knew Jesus was not calling me to reject my family’s culture. He loved my latinidad. He loved my roots, my ancestry. He was calling me to follow him as a Chicano.
That invitation is not unique to me. God fashioned each of us within a culture, and he says the same to all of us: “Come, follow me.” Certainly, because all Christians share the same Scriptures, the same church history, and the same Lord, we will have much in common across cultures. But our faith is not homogenizing. Jesus doesn’t ask us to abandon our home cultures but to submit them to his lordship.
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When Jesus called his first disciples, he never asked them to stop being Jewish—yet their Jewishness would now be formed in Jesus. Likewise, as Gentile converts flowed into the early church, the apostle James, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, determined that Jewish Christians “should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God” by demanding cultural change that God did not require on top of conformation to God’s ethics (Acts 15:19–20). Jesus was meeting the Gentiles within their cultures, as Gentiles.
But just as those Gentile Christians had to leave behind idolatry, so Latin American Christians cannot bring into the kingdom of God brujería (witchcraft) or prayers to Santa Muerte, an Aztec leftover (idolatry of “St. Death”). But that does not mean we must leave everything behind. Every ethnicity and people group has been infected with sin, but Jesus is the healer of us all. God is the Father “from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name” (Eph. 3:14–15, emphasis mine).
Decolonization still has its place in the pursuit of justice, but I want to be identified more by what I affirm—the gospel and the beauty of my culture—than by what I’m against. I think of the way Latin American cultures center the dinner table, representing the welcome of our community members and strangers alike. I think of the broadly indigenous understanding of humanity’s familial relationship with plants and animals, a way of life resonant with the moral view of Genesis 1 and 2.
I think of my abuelita, who sang worship songs in Spanish, who prayed while she cooked rice and beans, who was never ashamed to be Mexican, and who demonstrated faith and faithfulness in a hard and contentious world. All this can be brought into allegiance to Jesus.
And it will. In the end, when God has healed all our divisions through Jesus, he will bring “the glory and honor of the nations”—all nations—into the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:26). We will all bring our cultural glories as offerings to our Father.
Joshua Bocanegra lives in Kansas City, Missouri. He serves with Estuaries, a ministry dedicated to discipling community leaders in a way that is rigorous, Spirit-filled, and holistically healthy.
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